Do visual BSP/SEGS/SSECTORS tools exist?

[printz]

Are there helpful utilities that can graphically show the subsectors, segs or BSP nodes in the map layout, at least read-only? I need to get a better understanding of how a map looks divided into subsectors or nodes, so I can get a good meaning of how they ease map calculation in Doom.

[Gez]

DoomCAD had a "visual" node builder. Though it was both too fast to really understand what was happening if you didn't know how it worked already and extremely slow compared to using the external nodebuilder which didn't display anything.

I'm not sure one could manage to get DoomCAD to run on a modern OS, though. When I used it I had Win95.

[EarthQuake]

Eh, Deepsea allows you to step through the nodebuilding process, but like pretty much everything else in Deepsea, it's quirky as hell. It's not very flexible either, AFAIK. I don't think it shows subsectors (although you can sorta guess by looking at how sectors are broken down).

I've only used this to my advantage a few times to see how the BSP tree was split so I could debug some mapping anomalies.

[DaniJ]

One option is NodeView written by Andrew Apted to assist with the glBSP project (http://glbsp.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/glbsp/trunk/nodeview/). I've built and used it myself, its a nice tool with interactive node tree navigation.

Alternatively, load your map in a recent version of Doomsday, open the console and enter "rend-dev-blockmap 3". Doomsday will render the subsectors of the current map overlaid with the subsector blockmap. When using this debug aid the cvar "rend-dev-blockmap-debug" controls the scaling factor of the visual (e.g., "rend-dev-blockmap-debug .5" will draw it at 50% of original size.

Be warned that its not exactly fast (large maps will positively crawl with this visual enabled) because optimizing it is very low priority. Edit: In fact you might want to "freeze" the map while you're using it ("rend-dev-freeze 1") if its a particularly large one you're working with.